The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers (2018) in keeping with its baffling name, is a gloomy and muddled Western, shot mostly in Aragon and Navarre, Spain with some riparian terrain in Rumania standing in for Sierra Nevada foothills.  (As far as I can determine, the interiors and street scenes were shot in Belgium.)  Audiard has no idea how to make a Western and, seemingly, no appreciation for the genre.  (It probably doesn't help that the movie is produced by a Babel of European companies and that the morose and pessimistic Dardennes Brothers are among them.)  The credits show, at least, seven consultants on weapons and, probably, 25 horse specialists -- but the resulting film demonstrates that these hordes of experts don't result in anything that looks plausibly authentic.  There's an immediate tip-off in the first few scenes showing men on horseback -- the horses always seem to be galloping at an uncomfortably fast speed.  (Before putting in the DVD, I caught a few scenes from a third-rate American Western starring John Wayne -- Rooster Cogburn released in 1975.  The Hollywood movie isn't much good, but, at least, the scenes involving horses look plausible -- the actors are comfortable in the saddle and you don't get the sense that they are making the horse's run just for effect.  Obviously, John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as the titular characters weren't groomed making Westerns -- they don't have the ease and skill of actors like Randolph Scott or Tim Conway or any of the stable of performers who worked for John  Ford or Budd Boettcher.)  It's unfair to criticize The Sisters Brothers on the basis of its highfalutin' European origins -- after all, Sergio Leone made some of the greatest Westerns, fully comparable and, often, superior to American films, shooting, by and large, in southern Spain; similarly, Valeska Griesbach's Western shot in Bulgaria is a worthy interpretation of the genre.  The problem with The Sisters Brothers is that it's a lousy movie -- the script is awful and the film is so perversely shot and edited that the viewer, generally, can't figure out what is happening or why.

The film's premise is that two badly damaged men are employed as paid assassins by a shadowy figure who lives in a mansion with a big heraldic coat of arms over the front door -- the sort of showy palace where bad guys reside.  This villain is called simply "The Commodore" -- he's an enigmatic presence similar to the Judge in Cormac McCathy's Blood Meridian.  In fact, Blood Meridian, as a revisionist Western novel written in the mode and style of Melville's Moby Dick, looms mightily over the narrative in Audiard's film -- like the Judge, the Commodore, is sort of a stand-in for the Great White Whale, God, and what ever else you might want to project onto the figure.  The two Sisters Brothers, traumatized by an awful childhood (the younger more psychotic brother played by Phoenix has murdered their abusive, alcoholic father) are dispatched to kidnap a chemist.   The chemist who is en route to the goldfields in the Sierra Nevada is played by Riz Ahmed -- he has developed a chemical that when poured into a river reacts with the gold and causes the nuggets to glow with an unearthly light.  (This magical elixir is problematic on a number of grounds -- first, gold is valuable precisely because it is non-reactive; hence, the elixir works exactly on the basis of a quality that gold doesn't possess.  Second, the film maker and the scenarist obviously don't know anything about how gold is mined or the geology of the ore's presentation as a placer mineral.)  Another of the Commodore's henchmen, played by a mumbling Jake Gyllenhaal has also been sent to detain the chemist so that the Sisters Brothers, renowned gunfighters and assassins, can torture the secret formula out of the man.  Gyllenhaal's characters succumbs to the charms of the handsome and soft-spoken chemist and joins with him in an effort to escape the dogged pursuit by the Sisters brothers.  After several pointless gun battles, the boys catch-up with the chemist and the "scout" as Gyllenhaal is called.  They decide to betray the Commodore, use the chemical to harvest the gold from a mountain stream, and, then, escape as wealthy men.  But here a rather tedious and pretentious allegory intervenes.   The chemical that reveals the gold lurking in the stream bed is highly caustic.  Somehow or another, too much chemical is poured into the river with the result that the poor inventor of the formula burns himself so badly that he dies.  Gyllenhaal is also horribly burned by the caustic and commits suicide to escape the pain.  The psychotic younger Sisters brother has to have his right (gun) hand sawed-off due to horrible burns to that extremity.  Now, the Commodore is dispatching hordes of assassins that the lads have to kill in ineptly choreographed gun-battles.  The two brothers turn their horses north to Oregon City intent upon killing the Commodore.  But the Commodore cheats them of their vengeance.  He dies and, when the heavily armed boys burst into his mansion, the man is lying in his coffin.  (The undertaker notes that no one has attended the funeral and wonders if they will authorize him to close the coffin, something that is accomplished after the elder Sisters brother belts the corpse in the chops a couple times.)  Older but wiser, the Sisters brothers go home to their mother and a sort of happy ending ensues.

A curious aspect of this film is the director's inability (or unwillingness) to shoot his scenes in a way that makes the action intelligible.  It's a bad sign when the opening scene features lots of showy muzzle flashes in total darkness and, then, a bunch a corpses lying around in a farmhouse with gun men lurking here and there, popping up like moles in Whack--a-Mole to be gunned down.  A stables burns and horses lit on fire run free in the night.  The flaming horse is a spectacular apparition but Audiard is completely uninterested in showing who lit the stables on fire, or why or when or how.  In the climactic confrontation that turns out to be with the corpse of the Commodore, we see one brother decisively stalking along a porch going right with the camera tracking on him; then, we see a matching shot of the other brother going the other way on a similar porch.  Why in the world have the brothers split up to approach a common destination?  Is this some sort of clever stratagem?  But the next shot  shows the brothers marching together into the Commodore's mansion, elbow to elbow.  So what was the point of the showy tracking shots in which they seemed to be going in completely opposite directions to completely different destinations?  In the key scene in which too much of the caustic chemical gets spilled into a moonlit creek, we can't tell who is doing what or why this happens.  It's completely incoherent.  Again and again, the camera moves in a way to suggest that we are purposefully being led to see something -- but the shot just ends pointlessly cut to an image of one of the characters entering the frame from an angle or side geometrically inconsistent with where the figure was last seen.  There are whole sequences that are implausible and make no sense at all.  In one scene, a fat pregnant-looking spider appears out of nowhere.  The spider crawls over something -- we don't know what:  the bug looks comically gravid as opposed to menacing.  We are then shown John C. Reilly sleeping; he snore with his mouth open.  The arachnid, then, crawls into his mouth.  (I don't think any spider in the history of the world has been this dim-witted:  spiders generally try to avoid ending up in a larger creature's mouth.)  This lead to a bunch of scenes in which John C. Reilly experiences the pangs of the damned -- his mouth and face get picturesquely swollen and, later, he actually seems to vomit blood with spiderlings in it.  (Did the spider lay eggs in his cheek or what?)  The entire sequence is completely ridiculous and contributes nothing to the narrative.  Furthermore, it's shot in a confusing and poorly edited manner -- if you think back on 1962's Dr No, an old James Bond movies in which the sleeping Sean Connery is menaced by a tarantula, you will recall that there is a distinct code to how these sequences should be shot and edited:  that is, a way to frame the man and the spider so as to create suspense.  Audiard seems completely ignorant of these predecessor films.  He has a pre- D. W. Griffith sense of mise-en-scene.  Westerns involve space and clearly delineated action -- think of the parallel cutting in Monument Valley, for instance, of the Indians riding along side but apart from the cavalry in Fort Apache.  You know at all times the disposition of the forces and where they are located with respect to one another.  Audiard doesn't understand this at all.  Furthermore, since he has no graphic sense, he also has no idea how to build a scene toward a climax.  In one sequence, the two brothers quarrel in an expensive hotel restaurant in San Francisco.  Suddenly, one of them jumps up and hits the other brother.  We are as surprised as the aghast patrons of the restaurant -- the dialogue hitherto has been so bland, inert, and vapid that it is impossible to understand why the fight happened.  Nothing was said that wasn't said a dozen times before.  At one point, poor John C. Reilly has to say that "we have yet some of our youth".  No he doesn't.  He looks very old, tired, broken-down, at least 60 -- there's a lot of footage with his shirt off that's not particularly flattering to our hero:  he has a pot-belly and man-boobs (nothing like the shirtless Brad Pitt in Once upon a Time in Hollywood).  In the reunion scene at the end, Reilly's character looks as old or older than his mother.

The film has a pretentious theme:  greed versus an ideology of proto-Marxist Communism espoused by Riz Ahmed's chemist (who, nonetheless, succumbs literally to greed when the caustic gold-finding elixir scalds him to death).  There's not one line in the movie that seems authentic to the time and place -- 1851 Oregon.  Poor old Rutger Hauer (may he rest in peace) gets to play the Commodore in his casket and is punched in the dead nose a couple of times by the hero.  The titles tell us that the film was made "with the participation of Rutger Hauer".